Assignments

• Today
  • Cruz (2016)
  • Bold et al. (2018)
• Tuesday (4/9)
  • Climate and Development readings
• April 11
  • Final project proposal

Agenda

1. Cruz (2016)
2. Bold et al. (2018)
3. Review of Data Assignment 1

Introduction

Topics

1. Service delivery and the state
2. A brief history of non-state service delivery
3. Contemporary non-state service delivery

Learning Objectives

• What types of non-state actors are involved in service delivery in Africa?
• What are the main causes of the emergence and growth of these organizations, and what are their likely consequences for citizen welfare and state capacity?
• What are the limiting factors that are likely to prevent these actors from supplanting state service provision?

Service Delivery & The State

What do states do? (Hoffman, 2015)

• Monopolize violence
• Levy taxes
• Obtain the assent of the population

Why is public service delivery (PSD) important?

• Promotes economic growth
• Improves welfare of citizens

The Social Contract

Mutual reliance between states and citizens

• States need tax revenue
• Citizens need public services
  • Provision of clean water accounts for 60% of the increase in life expectancy in the United States between 1850 and 1950 (Troesken 2001).

Virtuous cycle between taxation, PSD, and state capacity

• Taxation \(\Rightarrow\) citizen demand for PSD
• Government PSD \(\Rightarrow\) citizen compliance with taxation
• Citizen compliance with taxation \(\Rightarrow\) increased state capacity
• Citizen reliance on PSD \(\Rightarrow\) political accountability (Hoffman and Gibson 2005)

The Fiscal Exchange (Bodea and LeBas 2014)

How does this work in social contexts without direct taxation?

Exchange-driven social contract emergence

• Compliance obtains when people expect that services will be delivered
• Compliance is conditional

Norm-driven social contract emergence

• Tax morale and civic duty
• Compliance is internalized

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

Service delivery in the pre-colonial period

• Pre-colonial African states did not engage in extensive service delivery (Herbst 2000)
  • States weren’t geographically bounded
• Christian missions were (kinda) the first service providers
  • Emphasis on literacy and formalizing indigenous languages
  • Competing with traditional healers (Chirwa 2016)

Colonial approaches to service delivery

• Traditional medicine was outlawed (Chirwa 2016)
• The church is “cemented” as the primary service provider (Jennings 2014)
  • Tanzania at the end of the colonial period
  • Church operated 81% of primary health facilities
  • Church-operated schools outnumbered government schools 4-to-1

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

A Brief History of Service Delivery in Africa

Post-colonial period

• Post-colonial African states nationalized service delivery infrastructure and increased spending dramatically
• Spending was unsustainable (Bates 1981; J. Brass 2014)
  • Kenya’s Civil Services (Young 1988)
  • 1945: 14,000
  • 1955: 45,000
  • 1978: 170,000
• Commodity boom \(\Rightarrow\) commodity bust
• Structural adjustment
  • Kenya’s Health Spending (J. Brass 2014)
  • 1980: $9.8 million
  • 1993: $6.2 million
  • 1996: $3.6 million

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

In 2007, 9% and 16% of US economic engagement with developing countries has been Official Development Assistance and private philanthropy respectively (Kapur and Whittle 2009).

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

Faith Based Organizations (FBOs) (Green et al. 2002)

• Church “umbrella” organizations (ex. Uganda Protestant Medical Bureau)
  • Less reliant on aid (Reinikka and Svensson 2010)
  • More reliant on user-fees (Munthali et al. 2015)
  • Focus on facility-based care in rural areas
  • Cost-sharing with government
  • Uganda: 45% of the hospital beds; ⅓ of the country’s health workers (Tumwesigye 2013)
• International religious FBOs (ex. World Vision)
  • Operate more like secular NGOs
• What do FBOs have in common? (Jennings 2014)

The Re-Entry of Non-State Providers

Malawi: Number of health facilities

Kenya: Number of health facilities

Regions

Non-governmental Organizations

What are NGOs?

• Private, non-profit organizations that aim to improve societal well-being through service delivery
• Provide free services, strengthen existing social infrastructure
• International, local
• Receive most of their funding from foreign aid contracts (Fafchamps and Owens 2009; J. N. Brass 2012)
• Generally seen as apolitical (Grebe 2016)
• Marie Stopes Uganda: Provided 75% of the Intrauterine Devices distributed in Uganda between 2006 and 2011
• Maximize on impact (Dang, Owens, et al. 2017)

Non-governmental Organizations

Who do NGOs serve?

• Target needy communities
• Target convenient communities
• “Pragmatic saints” (J. N. Brass 2012)

Regions

## Citizen Attitudes on NGOs

• Kenya: 70% of respondents said that NGOs “have the interests of the people in mind” but 34% said the same for government (J. Brass 2016).
• Tanzanian: 81% report that NGOs have “benefited” their community (Jivani 2010).
• Malawi: 60% agree that “Development NGOs provide services than cannot be provided by any other agency”; 68% consider NGOs to be effective (Jamali 2014).
• Liberia: 23% of respondents trust government but 72% trust NGOs; 72% describe government as corrupt, but 19% describe NGOs as corrupt (Tsai, 2017).

NGOs & Politics

How might NGO service delivery impact politics?

NGO service delivery may weaken the ‘Fiscal Link’

• Reduce reliance of government on taxation
• Reduce reliance on citizens on PSD
• Weaken the link between government performance and citizen welfare

NGO service delivery may undermine accountability

• Politicians get credit for NGO PSD (increase satisfaction)
• NGOs make people more apolitical about government PSD (decrease incentives to monitor)

NGOs & Politics

NGOs as complements to the state (J. Brass 2014)

• Joint implementation / co-production
  • Learning
  • Resource sharing
• Participation in government decision making
  • Lobbying for policy-changes
  • Transmitting information on citizen preferences
• Integration of NGOs into government plans
  • Budgeting

NGOs & Politics

NGOs as complements to the state (J. Brass 2014)

• NGOs don’t let governments “off the hook”
• Co-production builds state capacity
• NGOs encourage a spirit of democratic accountability

Necessary conditions

• Open political climate
• Autonomous agencies
• Motivated civil servants

The Limitations of NGOs

The Limitations of NGOs

Experimental Evidence on Scaling Up Education Reforms in Kenya (bold2013?)

• What is the reform?
  • Hiring contract teachers
  • Government vs NGO implementation
• Outcome?
  • Student test scores
• Why should it work?
  1. Smaller class sizes
  2. SMC can fire low-quality teachers
  3. Contract teachers don’t have tenure

The Limitations of NGOs

Experimental Evidence on Scaling Up Education Reforms in Kenya

• What are the findings?
  • NGO implementation increased test scores
  • Government implementation had no effect
• Why?
  • Teacher effort: No
  • Government monitoring: No
  • Bureaucratic delays in payment: Yes (⅓ of effect)
  • Political economy factors: Yes (union identification)

What does this tell us about the limitations of NGOs?

Additive Scale

What is an additive scale?

• Simple sum across columns (index = column_1 + column_2)

Takeaways

• When variables are measured on a common scale
• When you are interested in a cumulative amount of something
• Not good for likert scales
• How to deal with NAs